Road to... where?

For decades, the choice between investing in roads or
public transport has been an easy one for state governments - the
roads invariably win. Royce Millar examines how the car came to be
king.

Back in May, the State Government announced a plan that startled
many of Melbourne's motorists: in what was sold as a bold
initiative to deal with traffic congestion and encourage a shift
away from cars, a parking levy would be imposed on the city
centre.

Most observers assumed that the tens of millions of dollars
generated each year would go to promoting the alternatives, such as
public transport and bike paths. But they were wrong.

Part of the parking windfall will be spent on roads. So while
the Government is taxing motorists to discourage them from driving
to work, it is spending some of the spoils on new roads that will
encourage them to do just that.

In other cities - Perth in particular - this example of
Victorian transport policy in action stunned transport planners.
Back home, it barely raised an eyebrow. Why? Because such a
"balanced" approach is standard stuff in Victorian transport
policy. One influential Labor figure describes the Victorian way as
"a little bit for everybody". What could be wrong with such an
approach?

Plenty, say critics, who point to the record over decades of
what happens when governments are faced with a choice between
backing new roads or new public transport - the roads invariably
win. Melbourne's last new rail line, to Glen Waverley, was built in
1930.

The Bracks Government, among other things, promised when it came
to power, to build a rail extension to South Morang, in the city's
north, and extend the tram line to Knox, in the east. It also vowed
not to proceed with the Scoresby freeway. The reverse has
happened.

One of the Government's own infrastructure consultants,
Professor Bill Russell, says the Bracks Government is the "most
freewayfriendly" in Victoria's history. In another report for the
council-run Metropolitan Transport Forum, leading Australian
transport planner Professor Peter Newman compared Melbourne with 13
of the most "liveable" Australian and international cities. It
rated it close to the bottom on almost every indicator for public
transport.

Among the telling details unearthed in the study: Melbourne has
the greatest length of road per head of population - 9.53
metres.

Of course this situation hasn't simply evolved under the Bracks
Government, which came to power promising to transform Melbourne
into a compact, European-style city and to get people out of cars
and onto a stateof- the-art public transport system.

In 1969, a Liberal transport minister, Vernon Wilcox, also
promised big spending on public transport. In the opening
paragraphs of the 1969 Melbourne Transportation Plan, he said: "It
(the committee) has now produced a plan that recognises that there
is a place for all forms of transport in attempting to solve the
problem - in other words, it believes that balanced transport is
the only hope."

That plan is now infamous for becoming what historian Graeme
Davison describes as "the most expansive and expensive freeway
experiment in Australian history". The only rail project proposed
in the plan and not overlooked by Premier Henry Bolte was the city
loop. Rail extensions proposed but never built included East
Doncaster, Huntingdale to Ferntree Gully via Monash University, and
Frankston and Dandenong.

Until the mid-1950s Melbourne was a metropolis of rail, not
road. With the wealth from the gold rush still bountiful, city
fathers laid out a rail system that in the late 1800s and early
1900s was to become the envy of the world.

By 1951, a massive 57 per cent of Melburnians travelled to work
by public transport, high even by European standards; just 16 per
cent used cars. Fifty years later, public transport usage was down
to 9 per cent.

Of course, Melbourne like most Western cities was thoroughly
seduced and transformed by the excitement and individual freedom
promised by the car, especially in the boom years after World War
II.

In his history of the car in Melbourne, Car Wars, Davison says
that in the 1950s Melbourne's business, political and engineering
establishments were smitten by cars and roads. Premier Henry Bolte
went to the US and was, according to Davison, dazzled by its
freeways. Bolte was urged on by business leaders such as Kenneth
and Baillieu Myer and the City Development Association, a
forerunner of the Committee for Melbourne.

Russell, a senior advisor to the WA Government on transport
planning, says that with cars in vogue and rail patronage and
revenue in decline, both Bolte and his Liberal and Labor successors
turned their backs on public transport. Another transport
consultant, John Cox, a long-standing roads advocate, says
governments realised it was a mistake to "invest in a declining
market" and "throw good money after bad".

Russell says that years of "disinvestment" in public transport
left a huge "catch-up" bill for a government, like Bracks',
interested in re-embracing rail. So much so that a project such as
the Regional Fast Rail was incorrectly named because it is, in
reality, a long overdue maintenance project.

But the decline in public transport is not just about money. In
a sense, says University of Melbourne transport lecturer Paul Mees,
rail's earlier successes would play a big part in its phenomenal
decline in Melbourne.

With one of the biggest rail systems in the world came a
cumbersome and complacent bureaucracy that by the 1950s had neither
the will nor the way to fight a cocky young challenger - the
car.

"The railways was a 19th century bureaucracy that couldn't adapt
to the 20th century," says Mees. "We had a railways dinosaur off
playing in its own pen." Russell says the tramways was a more
energetic and innovative organisation but finally, merged in the
1980s with the railways, was squashed under "ossifying" railway
bureaucracy.

The RACV has played an important role in that battle between
rail and road since the 1930s, when its nascent members' magazine
first identified public transport as the enemy. Former RACV
chairman, RACV board member and current director of tollway builder
ConnectEast, Max Lay, agrees with Mees that public transport was
pummelled in Melbourne because it had no champions after the
mid-1950s.

"Roads were lucky after the war. There were wise people in
organisations like the CRB (Country Roads Board) that made
roads."

Russell agrees and points to VicRoads as the opposite of rail's
outmoded bureaucratic culture. He says VicRoads - a corporatised
statutory authority - is a comparatively young and dynamic agency.
"It is a public authority with many engineers, many forward
thinkers, lots of good plans, the capacity to advocate, the
capacity to network and the capacity to fight for funds," he
says.

VicRoads officers are free to speak publicly, lobby, work with
outside organisations. Russell notes that VicRoads has worked
closely with the RACV, private bus owners and business lobbies such
as the Committee for Melbourne, to ensure that ministers and the
public hear its pro-road message loud, clear and often. Transport
bureaucrats do not enjoy their freedom or their influence.

The Department of Infrastructure's organisational chart shows
VicRoads as an independent body sitting above the rest of the
bureaucracy with a direct line to the minister. Public transport,
by comparison, is submerged well down the food chain as a small
component of a big department.

A recently resigned DOI officer - who declined to be named -
says he left the bureaucracy out of despair. He says that for
decades VicRoads has enjoyed far greater influence than public
transport, a trend continued under Labor. The former officer says
that his colleagues were forever working on great ideas that never
saw the light of day and that, as a result, morale is low.

By contrast, VicRoads has built a reputation for getting things
done, on time, on budget. So even for green and pink-tinted Labor
types - and especially those in Treasury - the simplicity of the
road solution becomes attractive. "From the Treasury point of view
if you build roads, you put the concrete in the ground and move on,
whereas if you fund a railway you pay for staff and trains and
operator costs," says Russell.

The lack of investment in rail and poor culture in Victoria has
meant a lack of practice and confidence in delivering projects.
Regional fast rail is an obvious case in point.

And with the estimated cost nudging $1 billion after the
original $80 million, insiders say the project has pushed the
Government into the waiting arms of VicRoads and road advocates,
including private bus companies.

Transport Minister Peter Batchelor has conceded to The
Age that the Government has altered its priorities since the
blue-sky days of three or so years ago and that buses - and that
means roads - are now the major focus of public transport.

Critics say that on top of decades of neglect and inertia, and
partly because of it, Melbourne's public transport system got an
extra burden: privatisation. In trying to kill off a dinosaur, Jeff
Kennett created a monster of another kind.

Just three years after it bought into Melbourne's passenger rail
system, promising to deliver better service to more people, private
operator National Express was gone at a cost to Victorians of close
to $1 billion in additional subsidies to remaining operators - more
reason not to invest in new rail projects.

While Labor has criticised Kennett's privatisation, it has been
committed to its own version, Public Private Partnerships. But, as
the Government found with regional fast rail, and for that matter
with the Spencer Street Station redevelopment, PPPs don't work so
well on rail projects. Roads? No worries.

Russell says that despite the many forces working against
fixed-rail public transport, he says the Transport Minister and the
Government need to rise above them and demand action.

"I still believe the minister can insist. He can exercise his
will to place resources in this area," Russell says.

There is growing pressure for a new start in Victoria, along the
lines of Perth, where public transport is a major priority
attracting millions in new government spending. The Metropolitan
Transport Forum - made up of municipalities across Melbourne - has
called for a new public transport and planning agency. Russell
argues for a public transport commission charged with extending the
system to transport-starved outer areas and funded by developer
levies.

Common to most parties in the transport debate is the call for a
long-term plan that outlines what the Government plans to do, how
much it will spend, and when. Max Lay says it is impossible to
assess whether the Government has got its policy right because
there is no such plan to show what it is really thinking. Mees says
that without a detailed plan, both existing transport and planning
visions such as Melbourne 2030 are a bunch of meaningless
words and pretty pictures.

Under Bracks, promised rail extensions, including South Morang
in Melbourne's north, have been shelved. But new road projects -
most notably the East Link (Scoresby) tollway and Craigieburn
Bypass have been initiated despite a 1999 election vow not to build
it.

So complete has been the car's domination in Melbourne,
including under a theoretically pro-public transport Labor
Government, that even an old road campaigner such as Lay thinks the
figures suggest the current "balance" in transport policy may be a
little, well, unbalanced.

He says the Government's approach to roads is "sensible". " But
that doesn't mean that they ought to take money out of public
transport. The emphasis now should be on innovative public
transport."

It's not surprising, therefore, that rail advocates are wary of
the "b" word, and now call for an active bias in favour of public
transport and rail in particular. In places such as Vancouver in
Canada and Perth in WA, policies consciously favour public
transport over the car to lure motorists back on to trains and
buses.

Close to the Perth experiment is Murdoch University transport
expert and sometime consultant to the Bracks Government, Jeff
Kenworthy. He says it's time Labor dropped its policy of
balance.

"If Melbourne is going to fundamentally change it needs to
decide what it is going to prioritise: more roads or quality public
transport. This idea that you can hand out a little bit to both
just doesn't work." The thousands of commuters left standing at
east suburban railway stations last week after lightning halted
Melbourne's trains would probably agree.

Tomorrow:
Out west - a model for the futureWe also want to hear what public transport means to you.
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